Wednesday, March 05, 2014

Karl Vaters: Small Church Pastors Should Stand Tall [Podcast]


There’s a big gap in our pastoral leadership training.

If you want advice and training about how to grow a big church, you have lots of great material to choose from. But do you want to know how to pastor your current Small Church well? A lot of the time it feels like you’re on your own.

To make matters worse, there don’t seem to be a lot of church leaders expressing concern about this massive oversight.

Here’s how I wrote about this challenge in my post, 8 Simple Words that Can Transform Your Church.
If anyone asks “Why aim a ministry at helping Small Churches?”, my answer would be to pose another question.
Why aren’t there hundreds of ministries aimed at helping Small Churches?
About 80% of the churches in the world are small. And being small is different than being big – in a whole lot of ways. But, by my non-scientific estimate, 80-90% of pastoral help books, even those that claim to be written for all churches, are written from a grow-a-big-church perspective, while less than 1% are about how to pastor a Small Church. (The remaining 9-19%, for all you math geeks, are about planting churches or house churches).
Sure there’s some overlap of principles that apply to both small and large churches. But less than 1% of resources are designed for that huge chunk of space that only applies to Small Churches.

In today’s podcast, Jeff and Jonny of 200Churches.com interview me about the content of that post.
We talk about that gap and we offer some ideas about how to bridge it. Plus, we talk about
  • The importance of connecting with other Small Church pastors
  • Equipping Small Church leaders with the tools that work for their size
  • Why Small Churches are ideally suited to be the innovators in the body of Christ
  • and more

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